Setting up a members area in WP

A friend of mine has asked me to take over the hosting of his static site, and replace it eventually with a CMS site that he can update himself.

He currently has quite a large site, of about a 100 pages. This includes a basic members area, which is just a few pages inside a password protected directory.

I'm seeking some advice or suggestions on two aspects if possible.

1. If I build the new site with Wordpress, all the pages will be in the same directory. Is there anyway to organise the admin side of WP so that the pages can be grouped under the top navigation links? For example, his products page consists of one page with links to 17 other pages. I can imagine it could get messy trying to see the bigger picture with all the other pages listed! Just wondering if there is any way to make life easier for big WP sites?

2. Secondly, I'm not sure of the best way to set up a protected area in WP. I don't won't the whole site restricted. Just a few pages. I know that WP can password protect individual pages, but I don't want the user to have to login to each separate page.

I'm guessing I could set up a sort of doorway page that requires login info, and that page would in turn provide links to the other pages? I know the other pages wouldn't be strictly protected, but if I exclude them from the search engines with a robots.txt file, maybe that would be good enough?

Hey Myles, I wrote an article on my blog about this. Click the link below since I can't post the link yet and go into the blog. Its titled: Member's only area in Wordpress. Its not that hard to accomplish the members only area.

What I have done for larger sites is to have main categories such as products then set up the other pages as children of the parent. You can do some cool things then with menus and listing the sub pages. Also the urls are a lot neater if you set the permalinks up correctly such as yoursite.com/products/subpage1 yoursite.com/products/subpage2 instead of yoursite.com/subpage1 etc.

Thanks for the help and advice. I came across another solution that involved installing a second copy of wordpress in a separate directory. However, I like your method better.
I just need to get my head around the php side of things! Not my strong suit.